Roy Horan

A deeper understanding of designers’ core competencies and psychological traits supports both design education and more effective integration of design into industries seeking innovation. The Integral Psychological Profile, an instrumental breakthrough in psychometric testing, measured a group of young designers for core competence and trait ‘fit,’ or ‘compatibility,’ to various design curricula. Psychological ‘fit’ was significantly associated with better academic performance. Creativity, exploration, and proactivity emerged as gatekeepers to design proficiency with additional competency alignment reinforcing success. IPsP traits, found in high performers, closely matched previous attempts at defining designer attributes. A more comprehensive model of designer competence was developed. Findings also illumined some key psychological guidelines for advancing design in business.

A deeper understanding of designers’ core competencies and psychological traits supports both design education and more effective integration of design into industries seeking innovation. The Integral Psychological Profile, an instrumental breakthrough in psychometric testing, measured a group of young designers for core competence and trait ‘fit,’ or ‘compatibility,’ to various design curricula. Psychological ‘fit’ was significantly associated with better academic performance. Creativity, exploration, and proactivity emerged as gatekeepers to design proficiency with additional competency alignment reinforcing success. IPsP traits, found in high performers, closely matched previous attempts at defining designer attributes. A more comprehensive model of designer competence was developed. Findings also illumined some key psychological guidelines for advancing design in business.

The Integral Psychological Profile (IPsP) is an innovative self-report psychometric tool based on eight fundamental properties of living organisms hypothesized to manifest epiphenomenally in human psychology as eight core competencies. It measures aptitude, application and proactivity-reactivity within the competencies and across fifty-six psychological traits. IPsP also measures the degree of balance, or integration, between its psychological constructs. IPsP is an unusual diagnostic and developmental tool that challenges present psychometric tradition. It represents nonlinear natural processes in the context of the eight competencies by adopting, in its design, the mathematical, binary-coding system and wisdom of an ancient Chinese oracle, the I-Ching, which has been employed, over centuries, in many fields of endeavor as a tool for prediction, reflection and innovation. The design, development and empirical validation of the instrument is discussed.

... Correspondence should be sent to Roy Horan, Multimedia Innovation Centre, School of Design, The Hong Kong Poly-technic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon ... The word for intention in Sanskrit is sankalpa, meaning ''to wish, to be desirous of; purpose or resolve'' and ''to be ...